The divorce debate

A “zhorse” was recently born at the Manila Zoo—a beguiling combination of zebra and horse, brown as a horse, striped as a zebra! Zoo-keepers told news-reporters that the zoo had only one zebra left and when they noticed that it was going into fits of depression, they tried giving it a horse for a companion! But love—or whatever corresponds to it in the animal world— blossoms in the most unlikely places and both defied a long-accepted precept of zoology that species do not mix. “Evening came and morning came”—and behold, a zhorse!

When asked about his take on divorce some days ago, P-Noy let out some kind of a zhorse. What I made out of his rumbling remarks was that he is against divorce—he does not seem willing to take the Catholic Church head on—but is in favor of allowing “legally separated” couples to marry! If you allow separated spouses to be legally hitched to new spouses, then they are not just separated. You have sundered the bond that once made them spouses. When the union is not void, for reasons the law recognizes, from the very outset, or where the consent of either spouse is not in some way vitiated and you sunder the matrimonial bond, call it what you may, but that is divorce! In short, P-Noy is in favor of divorce, but he does not want to call it that!

The argument for divorce apparently goes this way: People sometimes make mistakes about the partners they choose, and it is thoughtless if not cruel to keep them hitched to each other when daily life has become a hell for both! That is of course putting it dramatically—but that is how dramatic divorce advocates can be. The other point usually advanced does not really qualify as an argument. It is a version of gaya-gaya. We are virtually the only jurisdiction now, it is complained, that does not accept divorce. I have always disliked calls to herd, and no matter how considerable the herd is that practices divorce, that in itself would not count as an argument for it.

Even if its opponents in Congress, however, prevail once more, as they always did in the past, the divorce debate will resurface because, Giddens points out, the family and marriage that used to be at its core, have gone the way of “shell institutions”—called by the same name but not quite what they used to be! Family used to mean father, mother, children, the relations between them and the relations with kin. We learn from historians that the family was an economic unit: it produced what it needed and probably what it could exchange for things it needed but could not produce. So it was not really love, or intimacy, or sex that brought forth the family. All that has changed. A man and a woman fall in love, or at least think they do, and they make a decision about having children or not having them at all. They move in together and enjoy sex, and procreating is not really the point to it all. So when Catholic moral theologians and canonists insist on procreation as the end of marriage, they are clearly in the Platonic realm of the Eidos or are simply out of touch with what social theorists and philosophers have for some time written about. So it is, Giddens says, that it is not so much “Are you married?” that is the more frequently asked question these days, as “Are you in a relationship?” Anyone who has opened Facebook at least once will readily confirm this!

All that is not to say that I am in favor of divorce, but you cannot debate an issue in any worthwhile and productive manner without a long and hard look at how things are and where they stand (no pun intended)! I will reprise the argument against divorce. You do not really need it—unless the real agendum is to give people already married another chance at another deal! If, as its more dramatic advocates argue, one spouse has become insufferable—meaning by that deceitful, cruel, heartless, thoughtless (and not “insufferable” because I want another) —then the law already offers the solution of “legal separation’. It will be objected, however: That does not permit them remarriage! But I thought that the problem was the “unbearable” union! Then too if the marriage is afflicted by some infirmity —such as the inability of one of the spouses to maintain a stable , life-long relationship —under our rather generous and pliant jurisprudence on the nullity of marriage, one or the other title under existing law may just fit to allow for a decree of the absolute nullity of marriage. Then of course, you have the different titles under which consent is deemed vitiated and provided the action for annulment is filed seasonably, the partners may eventually go their separate ways, and remarry! Given all this, it does seem that the only reason for divorce is when persons married to each other in a union suffering no defect or harboring no reason for the law to grant relief presently available want another chance at hitching themselves to new partners. And that, to me, is not good enough a reason for divorce, especially when, children pay the costs! Marriage must be more serious than that!

Professor Jose Flores Espinosa, at one time legal counsel of the University of the Philippines and also professor at the University of Santo Tomas Graduate School, devised his own reductio ad absurdum argument. You grant divorce either for any reason whatsoever or for some. We certainly will reject the first of the disjunction because it would make of marriage a complete mockery. Why marry if you can be divorced for about any reason, including the ceaseless baying of a pet dog? On the other hand, if you grant divorce for some reasons and not for others, how do you determine that the suffering, misery, or pathos of those to whom you deny it is any less than that of those to whom you grant it? In that case, you are being unfair if not whimsical! Since it will not do then to grant divorce on any ground, or on some grounds only, then it really should not be granted at all!

Something must be done about marriage —I will not debate that. First, it must be freed from the “obligation to reproduce”. Whatever vestige of a discredited natural-law argument still holds sway in this respect must be dismantled as surely and as relentlessly as the demolition of the shanties of “informal settlers”. Unfortunately, that marriage must show its fruit in children is not a proposition confined to dusty tomes of medieval moral theology. It is very much in the Filipino psyche. How often does one hear it asked of a couple: May anak na ba sila?—as if that had to follow because of marriage. I agree: they must be open to life and not selfishly close themselves to new life emerging from their union, but to say that they must reproduce is to enlist them in a breeding program!

More important, however, is what Giddens calls “the democracy of emotions”: in much the same way as we look forward to the flourishing of a democratic society where all participate in the deliberative processes by which we organize our lives, a marriage must be a partnership of equals, the only foundation on which trust and dialogue can truly arise.

That, to me, is much more promising a prospect that a zoo full of zhorses! –Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino, Manila Standard Today

rannie_aquino@rannieaquino.com